Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become a highly popular mode of marketing and rightly so. Check out some of the ways you can benefit from influencers:

1. Increasing brand awareness

When an influencer vouches for your products or services on social media channels, they’re advertising your brand to new people. Influencer marketing is an excellent, effortless way to let more consumers know of your company's existence.

2. Gaining credibility

No matter what industry you’re in, it’s extremely difficult to provide credibility and authority to your potential customers. By getting an influencer to promote your brand, you can jumpstart the process of earning the trust of consumers.

3. Expanding your reach

It’s not always easy to get recognized by your target audience. Through influencer marketing, you can reach out to an audience that's more likely to be interested in what you're offering.

This can be clearly seen in the case of Sprout It. The company wanted to celebrate its new iPad app by giving fans a chance to win a makeover for their backyard.

These bloggers helped promote the campaign through their blogs as you can see in the above image.

With the help of influencers, the Facebook posts about the campaign managed to reach 300,000 people.

As a result, the Sprout It page on Facebook tripled its followers, reducing costs. When you work with an influencer to market your brand or products, you can cut down on advertising costs.

Instead of blindly risking most of your funds on different marketing efforts, you’re concentrating them on a highly influential individual.

4. Reducing costs

When you work with an influencer to market your brand or products, you can cut down on advertising costs.

Instead of blindly risking most of your funds on different marketing efforts, you’re concentrating them on a highly influential individual.

5. Saving time

With influencer marketing, you're focusing your advertising efforts on one channel, which effectively saves time and effort.

This channel is an influential individual who can easily help you influence their followers.

6. Improving SEO

Links are highly useful for enhancing your SEO profile, and influencer marketing contributes to this. An influencer can help optimize your website for search engines by creating more links to your pages.

Tips and Ideas for Influencer Marketing

Getting influencers to market your brand or products isn't as simple as it looks. You'll need to put in some effort in the beginning so that you can reap long-term benefits.

Here I've put together a few useful tips and ideas to help you implement influencer marketing into your monthly strategy.

1. Getting started

The initial steps are the most difficult when it comes to marketing with influencers. You'll need to take careful first steps to ensure the success of your move. Follow these basic steps to get started:

Identify influencers – The best way to start with influencer marketing is to figure out the individuals that influence your target audience. There are a lot of influential people on the Internet. You don’t want to make the mistake of working with the wrong influencer. Make a list of relevant keywords that will help you find the right people.

To find the most influential bloggers in your niche, try Buzzsumo or conduct a search on Blog-Search.com, which allows you to filter blogs based on different categories.

Followerwonk is a Moz tool for help finding Twitter profiles using specific search terms. You can filter the search results by number of followers and by location.

It also enables you to narrow down profiles based on their social authority. Then you can easily identify the most influential people.

Focus your efforts on the most influential – After determining which individuals can influence your buyers, the next move is to prioritize them based on their level of impact. Instead of teaming up with each and every influencer, you need to concentrate your efforts on those with the biggest impact. Try building a relationship with these individuals by engaging them and periodically establishing touch points with them. Commenting on their blog posts or retweeting their content could be a great way to start.

Reach out to influencers – Once you’ve built an online relationship with your choice of influencers, you'll need to personally reach out to them via email. Introduce yourself and your brand so that they have a clear idea about who they’re interacting with. The email should tell influencers what you need from them and what’s the benefit for them.

2. Share influencers' content on social media

Getting influencers to notice you could be as easy as sharing their content through social media channels.

Most individuals who consistently publish content notice the mentions on Twitter and Facebook. Some influencers may even re-tweet those mentions. For instance, see how Compass Learning has re-tweeted a tweet mentioning them.

3. Send them pre-populated tweets

Many big influencers are pressed for time. You can make it more convenient for them to promote your brand by sending them an email with a link to a pre-populated tweet.

This will encourage them to share your posts because they don’t need to spend any time writing the tweet.

Whether it’s a post promoting a product or event, they can easily share the news with their audience. Here's an image of an email sent by Snappa to encourage subscribers to share their blog post.

Try sending a similar email to the top influencers in your industry.

Here's an image of an email sent by Snappa to encourage subscribers to share their blog post. Try sending a similar email to the top influencers in your industry.

4. Let them know about your mention

Influencers may not have the time to go through every post that has mentioned them. The best way to get them to notice your mention is tell them in an email.

5. Present them with a thoughtful gift

Give influencers a reason to talk about you to their followers by sending them something thoughtful.

If you have an idea about what they might like, a gift would be a great way to build your relationship. Books, free samples of your products, and access to events are great gift ideas.

This is an especially popular move in the fashion blogging world where clothing brands send their brand's clothing and accessories to fashion bloggers.
The blogger then writes a post about these items and posts photos of them. This makes her readers want to shop from the brand, which is the goal of influencer marketing.
Famous fashion blogger Aimee Song mentions all the brands she’s wearing for each post in her blog, Song of Style.

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant that specializes in sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, Influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.

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